Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka “The leaden circles dissolved in the air”
Transmitter
[Image: Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka "day for night" (2019) reflective vinyl, flexible urethane resin and video projection]
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Transmitter presents The leaden circles dissolved in the air, a two-person exhibition featuring work by Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka. This is the first exhibition pairing the work of these two artists, who have collaborated as part of a larger collective, and lived together as a couple for over forty years.
The title is taken from a refrain in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, pointing to time and its passage. For both Episalla and Yamaoka, time is porous and elastic, and material is mutable and malleable. Memory, movement, and the viewers’ perception and experience of the work are essential to both of their practices.
Moving away from representation, Episalla pushes photography and video towards sculptural abstraction. Her recent foldtograms (folded photograms) record her performative actions and build on her prior efforts to delineate time. By removing the camera itself, and breaking with established darkroom practices, she challenges assumptions about what a photograph is. Transforming a static two-dimensional photographic image into a sculptural object reveals the artist’s interaction with the material and her focus on the possible metamorphosis of the photographic surface.
Yamaoka’s work is concerned with visibility and the immediacy of perception. Through experimentation with surface, scale, light, and the way materials behave and misbehave, Yamaoka challenges the viewer’s sense of self, sight, and site, as they navigate objects that morph as surrounding conditions change. T
he leaden circles dissolved in the air features a new collaborative installation day for night, created for this exhibition, highlighting the duo’s longtime proximity to each other.
About the artists:
Joy Episalla is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist whose work pushes photography and the moving image into the territory of sculpture. Since the 1980s, she has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including solo exhibitions and projects at Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris; International Center of Photography, New York; and Participant, Inc., New York; among others. Episalla’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art; MoMA/PS1, New York; Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris; Artists Space, New York; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. She is the recipient of a 2003 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Episalla is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy. This fall her work can be seen in arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
Carrie Yamaoka is a New York–based visual artist working in the expanded field of painting. Yamaoka has shown widely in the US and Europe since the 1980s. Her work is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Yamaoka is a 2017 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and a 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellow. Her first solo museum exhibition opened this July at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, in Seattle, and will run through November 3rd. She is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy. Her work will be featured in arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified, in the upcoming fall season at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
Media
Schedule
from July 26, 2019 to August 25, 2019